Convictions and self-deception: attention and the fundamental vulnerability

Abstract

The present study focuses on the anthropological factors that constitute a kind of specifically human vulnerability. This typically human fragility can be expressed in many different ways that have something in common with fallibility, faultiness, which consists in an oscillation between greatness and finitude. As far as vulnerability itself is concerned, it means a susceptibility to being easily affected, an exposure to injury. Insofar as I speak, in the rest of this research, of the phenomenon of self-deception, it is a question, in the case being investigated, of making injury to oneself. In order to understand how it is possible to wound oneself in the analysed sense, it seems necessary to refer to some kind of maintaining a rupture, of an inconsistency within a set of convictions that one forms about oneself, other people, and the world.
 My investigation below is divided into four parts. First, I describe analytically, and from a rather epistemological perspective, the essential components that define the phenomenon of self-deception. To do so, I will rely mainly on Donald Davidson's well-known text Deception and Division. Secondly, I briefly review the more important solutions that have been proposed to deal with the difficulty in question. These proposals can be classified into two groups: the first contains the solutions that consider the conflicting beliefs in terms of their intentionality; the second group of solutions, on the contrary, includes the non-intentional solutions. The brief examination of them shows that the most philosophically promising views bear the mark of an insurmountable weakness and therefore require new approaches. Thirdly, I propose to take up some of the achievements of Paul Ricoeur's thought and I justify my choice. In addition, I try to establish a link between the problem of self-deception and the Ricoeurian theme of attention. Fourthly and finally, starting from the Ricoeurian phenomenology of attention, I present a possible understanding of self-deception that would keep both the intentionality of the opposing convictions (and thus the philosophical scope of the problem) and its rootedness in a real human experience (and thus a concrete, less abstract character of the approach than the one referring to mathematical models). As a result, the study offers a new understanding of vulnerability as a constituent of the human condition.